‘Cougar Town’ Begins Fourth Season, With New Show Runner

Cougar Town Courteney Cox and Josh Hopkins, newlyweds in this television show, which is entering its fourth season. It is broadcast on TBS on Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

Michael Yarish / TBS

By NEIL GENZLINGER

January 7, 2013

“The whole point of having a child is to love it and to nurture it and to worry about it,” Courteney Cox’s character, Jules, says in the second episode of the new season of “Cougar Town.” “And eventually, if you’ve done your job right, the child doesn’t need you anymore.”

Jules is talking to her son, Travis (Dan Byrd), but fans who have followed the off-camera transmutations of the series may well think the lines are some kind of metaphor for the show itself. The new season, the fourth, which begins on Tuesday night, not only finds the show at a new network — TBS instead of ABC — but also finds it without its creators, Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel, at the helm.

Show-runner duties have been turned over to Ric Swartzlander. But to paraphrase Jules, Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Biegel must have done their jobs right because their child doesn’t need them anymore to continue to be what it has been all along: an eclectic comedy that is smarter than mainstream fare like “Last Man Standing” but still feels like comfort food.

At the beginning of each episode the show displays a map of Florida that locates the fictional town of the title, along with a cheeky label that changes each week. For the season premiere it says: “Welcome back to Cougar Town. Thanks, TBS. Can we curse on TV now?”

That’s a somewhat ominous welcome, since one of the show’s strong points has always been that it flirts with bad taste but (usually) pulls up just short of it. There is no cursing at the new address, but in the season’s first couple of episodes there is more potty humor than is usual.

Eventually, though, everyone seems to get over whatever new license the move to cable has provided and goes back to the mix of drollness and incongruity that has made “Cougar Town” a pretty good ensemble comedy. In the first six episodes no big surprises are rolled out, at least nothing comparable to Season 3, in which Jules’s fiancé, Grayson (Josh Hopkins), learned that he had a daughter from a previous relationship and, in the two-part finale, he and Jules married.

The show, which centers on a group of friends who spend seemingly every waking moment together, needs those kinds of shake-ups occasionally to avoid feeling claustrophobic, and presumably some will be coming along. But what it needs the most at the start of Season 4 is to reassure fans that Jules and Grayson’s marriage won’t deaden the show; that Christa Miller, who plays Jules’s caustic best friend, will continue to get most of the killer lines, even though her real-life husband, Mr. Lawrence, is no longer in charge; and that the show’s signature daffiness will remain intact.

All those requirements are met, and in February viewers will be rewarded with a particularly hilarious episode that reveals, through flashbacks, how the series’s core relationships and running gags began: a nice touch from one of TV’s more underappreciated sitcoms.